Fledgling 1958

Tadashi Nakayama made this print, Fledgling, in 1958 with a woodblock. What gets me about this piece is the way Nakayama balances simplicity and detail, abstraction and representation. The background is layered with a sort of grungy olive green. Look closely, and you'll see that the circles in the print aren’t perfect. They're more like ghostly echoes, adding to the dreamlike quality of the image. The fledgling itself is made of these graphic strokes, but somehow the artist manages to evoke the delicacy of feathers. It’s so precise, so intentional, yet it feels spontaneous, like each mark was made in a single breath. Nakayama’s work reminds me of Joan Miró, in the sense of simplified biomorphic shapes, but there is something very different in the texture and groundedness. For me, this piece is a reminder that art is really just an ongoing conversation, of different ways of seeing and experiencing the world.